I'm your host, ROCK MELTER. I've been an EVE Online player since BETA. I am what a lot of people in Eve consider a "BITTER VET". I think that title fits me well. I have several accounts in Eve that I use and I am the CEO of the GetCo corporation. I will give you a different view of Eve online IF you can put up with my rants...

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Bedrock principles - Oil & Water - Eve Online

I've received the following statement or question five times now during
my CSM run, and I thought it would be useful to make public what is
becoming my standard answer to the question.

Here's the statement netted down to its basic form:

Scamming should be against the EULA. Don't you think so, Jester?

Here's what is becoming my standard response:

You are directly attacking one of the bedrock principles that EVE rests
on.EVE is a sandbox controlled by player actions with the barest
minimum action against players taken by CCP. It is quite literally laissez-faire capitalism taken to the farthest extreme. In a very real way, that principle is what a lot of EVE players play EVE for: it is not
Star Trek, where humanity is a many times nicer version of itself.
Instead, it is a world built without warning labels or consumer
protection bureaus where you have to watch out for yourself. Stealing
from people is a valid tactic within the game. Hell, CCP wrote a whole
trailer video about it promoting this style of game-play.

In EVE, wherever possible, in-game problems are solved by the players, not the devs.

If
scamming bothers you that much, why not start a searchable database of
scammers that EVE players can reference, add to, and comment on? Then
as it becomes a popular service, add in-game or RL advertising and make a
few ISK/dollars for yourself? That is the sort of player-driven
solution that compliments how EVE is built. This is how an EVE player
solves an in-game problem, not another set of rules that CCP has to
enforce.

It's a pretty harsh answer, but "harsh" is what EVE is about. Sorry I can't give you an answer you like better...

Might lose me a few votes, but that's what I believe on this topic. Here's the trailer that I reference in the response:

Now my response.

First off, the first and second sentence are at odds with each other. Eve will never have any bedrock principals BECAUSE it is a SANDBOX!

"Harsh" is what Eve is all about. Very interesting statement there. Again, if this is a true sandbox and you want to run for the CSM, maybe even be the Chairperson for the CSM then perhaps sir you should STOP telling me how to play in my OWN SANDBOX! LISTEN to all of the player base and not what YOU perceive to be what the eve universe is!

Focus: CSM Summit Minutes, "Null-sec" sessions
Let's start with the most famous quote in these two sections, shall we?

On top of that, Soundwave added, the POS system by itself would only affect a small portion of the community.

Now, I've already mentioned this quote in another blog post and pointed to both Two step's blog post about it and his growing threadnaught.
It's up to 121 pages, and I'm told that CCP is counting the number of
unique player accounts that reply to that thread. So if you've been
thinking about posting in there but think your contribution doesn't
matter or enough players have already spoken up about it, I'd encourage
you to revisit that thought process.

So was Two Step wrong when he went public with this and not stay quite like Selene and the rest of CSM wanted him to? or do you think he really did the right thing? or is that not a fair question to ask now?

So I say this to you Jester. You have been asked so far 6 times now, since I am including myself in this blog "Scamming should be against the EULA. Don't you think so, Jester?". That would statistically show you the same thing? That maybe you should not be so set in what you think Eve is and work more on what we ALL LIKE about eve.

If I am ever to have a quote in Eve it will be this:

"Eve Online does not have any Bedrock Principles as that contridicts the very nature of how the sandbox design was created". - ROCK MELTER

2 comments:

As mentioned at dinner tonight, six principles of game design to which Jester may have been alluding: http://mararinn.blogspot.com/2013/04/fanfest-2013-design-principles.html

To my thinking there must be some bedrock to a sandbox game otherwise there will be nothing to hold the sand in: if the borders of the game are not defined then the game design will dilute over time and have no direction.

Thank you for your thoughts, discussion like this is necessary to help shape better arguments,

Hello Mara Rinn! I had a very good time talking with you at this years fanfest and I am very glad that you took our discussion to the web so others can benefit :-)

and thank you for the coozie as well! I will feature it properly being used in a later blog...

I still disagree with you though and will be dedicating another blog to this point in the very near future. I just got back home from Fanfest and starting to settle back in. So blogs about the fanfest and other things are all forthcoming. Just need the time is all :-)

So much to blog about and so little time it seems to get it all done! Thanks again for the reply :-)